Bidirectional LED transmission on single-mode fibre in the 1300 and 1500 nm wavelength regions

Bidirectional transmission was demonstrated over 15 km of standard single-mode fibre using 1300 and 1500 nm edge-emitting LEDs at 140 Mbit/s and 45 Mbit/s, respectively. The bidirectional WDM filters, including two connectors, contributed 3.2 dB insertion loss in the 1300 nm channel and 2.6 dB in the 1500 nm channel. Spectral filtering introduced by the WDM devices reduced the dispersion penalty from 1.0 dB to 0.2 dB for the 1300 nm channel, and from 3.6 dB to 2.7 dB for the 1500 nm channel. The available system margins were 3.3 dB for the 140 Mbit/s channel and 8.0 dB for the 45 Mbit/s channel.